Psychological and Sociological Factors Weakening Public Budget Awareness

Yüksel, Cihan

Public budget, which is the total of the expenditures made to meet the common needs of the society and of the revenues obtained to finance these expenditures, can be expressed with a “common wallet” metaphor. However, the main problem is, in case that public resources are not used correctly and effectively, why citizens do not show as much sensitivity towards their common wallets, as they show towards their personal wallets. It is important to examine the factors that weaken public budget awareness (common wallet perception) on the basis of behavioral economics, which is an area that observes the effects of people's attitudes, behaviors, and thoughts on economic-based choices and decisions and examines these observations based on experiments. For this reason, the main purpo...